Meeting the demands of businesses and consumers generally requires that bandwidth and latency guarantees continue to be met when failures occur. Protection mechanisms become necessary to ensure that services are restored within a sufficiently short time so that the user experience is not affected. To address this requirement, various “Fast Reroute” techniques have been developed that provide rapid reaction to a failure such that the user experience is preserved. In a network employing Fast Reroute, traffic flowing through a failed link or node is rerouted through one or more preconfigured backup tunnels or alternate paths. The presence of loops due to transient inconsistencies in the forwarding information bases during network convergence may result in packet loss and impact the user experience.
Corresponding reference characters indicate corresponding parts throughout the several views of the drawings.